For the gallery’s first trip to the Hamptons Fine Art Fair, Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is presenting Good Grounds, Drowned Meadows. The group project includes works by German artist Claudia Rega, San Francisco-based Chinese artist Xiao He—and works by Los Angeles-based artists Chris Reisig & Leeza Taylor and objet A.D. The exhibited pieces consist of paintings, drawings, and mixed-media works ranging between figuration and abstraction through expression-driven processes.

Beginning in the early 20th century, the idyllic hamlets populating the eastern region of Long Island came to be collectively referred to as “The Hamptons.” Over time, various names of places throughout Long Island were changed to attract more permanent residents as well seasonal vacationers. Playing with this shifting history of how The Hamptons and surrounding areas came to be reimagined through a uniquely American project of producing holiday destinations, this exhibition presents artworks that find ways of showing how the social construction of a place creates a material world through imaginary concepts, symbolic structures, and aesthetic sensations. The exhibiting pieces work through relations between memory, nostalgia, history, and (sense of) place.

This project is aimed at working-through an art fair or market as a hallucinatory concoction of travel, wealth, and consumption—a kind of mirage or a distortion of how a place comes to be seen and imagined. Addressing this mirage, the exhibition focuses on recording the complex historical contexts and visions of the place itself, which often come under erasure as soon as somewhere becomes a holiday “destination.” How is the imagination of space constructed through infrastructures of desire and consumption? The images included in the exhibition begin to work with this question.

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The first part of the title of the exhibition—“Good Grounds”—is a phrase displaced (and made plural) from the historical colonial name of the area where the gallery-workers will be staying on Long Island (where the Hamptons are located). “Good Ground,” founded in 1740, was the name of one of the (eleven) hamlets that make-up what is now referred to as Hampton Bays, the isthmus connecting (southern) Long Island to the Hamptons. The area’s name came to be changed to “Hampton Bays” around the early 1920s, when (some) residents and real estate entrepreneurs shifted the name to align with the nearby surge in property acquisitions throughout the hamlets of the Hamptons located further East, including East Hampton and the Southamptons. The second phrase comprising the exhibition title, “Drowned Meadows” is another displaced pluralization of a place-name that is no longer used: “Drowned Meadow” (claimed in 1682) was the name of what is now called Port Jefferson on Long Island. Like “Good Ground,” this shift in name seems to have occurred around World War I, when people living in New York started looking to Long Island for a different kind of lifestyle and property. Attempting to take advantage of the increase in property sales, the name was changed from “Drowned Meadow” to Port Jefferson as a more amicable-sounding name.

Of course, before any of these colonial place-names took hold in Long Island, the area was inhabited by various indigenous communities of the Algonquian language-group (an indigenous language-group that covers much of the northern Atlantic coast into the middle-western interior of North America). However, it is difficult to articulate a more precise history of these populations as the historical view of the peoples inhabiting Long Island was distorted by likely inaccurate accounts of the island’s indigenous communities which recorded the presence of “thirteen tribes”: Canarsee, Rockaway, Merrick, Marsapeague, Secatogue, Unkechaug, Matinecock, Nesaquake, Setalcott, Corchaug, Shinnecock, Manhasset and Montauk. Although this mythological rendering of the history of Long Island is often repeated today (and is seen in many of the names of hamlets and towns throughout Long Island and the Hamptons, contemporary archaeological-historical analysis tends toward an understanding of the Long Island indigenous population as consisting of more individual familial and kinship formations that were not as clearly organized as this clean-cut account of thirteen distinct “tribes” or communities. This tangled history of names presents a complex re-imagination of the layered relationships between colonization, markets, vacation, identity, and place.

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Recursively working-through this shifting history of places and names (in response to markets and desires), the works included in the exhibition work-through an artwork’s entanglements between memory, history, body (figure), material, and place. By quietly bringing-out these entanglements, the exhibition situates questions of how the aesthetic enjoyment of a place is both an organic relation occurring between a body and its environment—or a person and the places they go—and a artificial re-imagination of a place by the (real estate) markets that re-construct its image as something, or rather somewhere, to be consumed (before someone else eats it…). Eventually, this line of questioning works-through problems of capitalism’s construction of a “vacation,” “holiday,” or “(summer) break” as something to be scarcely enjoyed—and even more scarcely secured or acquired. What is the relationship between desire (for somewhere or someone else) and colonization or the re-construction of already-existing places? What does the history of Long and Island and the Hamptons reveal about the interactions between how the imagination or image of a place—and in particular a play where people go on holiday—and the markets that construct this image? And how does this view provide a different position for questioning how we see, experience, remember, and want a place? By obliquely moving along these questions, the collected works subtly build a kind of interstitial, in-between, or suspended sense of place where the various relationships between markets, institutions, and constructions of time are made visible, or at least remembered in some form or another. And an artwork’s capacity to openly display and pass-through these ambiguous but deterministic systems. For example, the development of the idea of vacation and vacation-homes is observably a response to institutional, educational, and professional or career-based calendars.

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Claudia Rega is a contemporary German artist living and working in Münster, Germany. With richly textured yet smoothly flowing surfaces, she works primarily through painting and drawing with oil, acrylic, and oil-stick. Combining landscape perspectives and drifting figural populations, her practice traces aesthetic and historical relations between natural scenes and the power of the young girl. By simultaneously working-through traditions of landscape-paintings and the art historical obsession with the feminine figure, her works locate a vulnerable power between nature—or, more specifically, a changing but precious environment—and femininity. Her expressive practice does not necessarily distinguish between abstraction and figuration: a body and the world that reaches out from (or towards) it occur at the same time, in a continuous painterly sequence. Time, memory, femininity, and (dis)appearing space are recurring horizons of her work.

Some of her most recent (2023) exhibitions and excursions include: G.ART.EN, Como, Selfscape; Stav Art Gallery, New York, USA; Pouch Cove Foundation, Residency, Canada; Inventory, Karl Oskar Gallery, Berlin, D, G; and Volta Basel, Karl Oskar Gallery, Basel, CH.

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Xiao He (b. 1998, Chengdu, China) is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in San Francisco. Xiao holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. Xiao’s works have been exhibited internationally, including 2022 Art Capital (Paris, France), 2021 Biennale di Genova (Genoa, Italy), Upstream Gallery (New York, USA), Huacui Contemporary Art Center (Shanghai, China) and Zhou B Art Center (Chicago, USA). Her artist interviews have been featured on Al-Tiba9 Art Magazine, VoyageLA, and Vogue China, along with residencies awarded at the Cubberley Artist Studio Program (2024) and Kala Art Institute (2023). Her mixed media artists’ book A Collection of Random Thoughts is now part of the permanent collection of Joan Flasch Artists’ Book collection in Chicago. Xiao is also a member of Oil Painters of America and served on the Apex Art New York jury panel.

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E + Z = objet A.D / Object 80 (LXXX)

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Chris Reisig and Leeza Taylor are an art duo living in Los Angeles.

Both their early works in analog photography and current works in lenticular assemblage are exhibited in galleries throughout the United States, including: The White Room Gallery (Bridgehampton); Julie Zener Gallery (Kentfield, Mill Valley); and Aspen Art Gallery (Aspen). In 2020, the founded Reisig and Taylor Contemporary as an extension of their lifelong careers as artists, collectors, and artworkers.

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A Note on Economy:

In the context of art fair exhibitions such as this, Reisig and Taylor Contemporary organizes shows as direct encounters with the market, and therefore as a unique way of facing the public and the economy. As a gallery which aims to focalize the often absent political-economic context of exhibitions as part of the literal material of the gallery-space, it is important that the gallery takes-up the space of an art fair as an opportunity to critically engage the economic structures governing the transaction and circulation of artwork. The gallery takes the context of the market as a question of how artworks circulate and what it means for an artwork to become a financial object that is wholly attached to the work of art (or at least its significance), while also having almost no relation to the object or encounter in itself. Therefore, there is the question of the work of art “before and after” the market—before it becomes something else, somewhere else. This particular problem-place of vision, desire, object, consumption, and exchange structures the critical formulation of the gallery’s art fair exhibitions.